Go On, Go Vote, Do It for Me, It’s My Birthday

Mr. Booth has lost his voice. He seems to lose it every time I listen to the radio.

I can’t seem to tune him out.

If you have been keeping your pulse on the slow-moving, but subversive world of advertising in Vancouver, you too may have heard the ad of Mr. Booth, the man who started the petition, but lost his voice on election day (because he didn’t vote).

It’s actually a good ad. I’d like a bit of variety myself, maybe Wanda the schoolteacher catching laryngitis at the wrong time, or Glen, the shipyard worker, choking on a misshapen snack just as his poker buddies ask him what he thinks.

But you get the idea. Political advertising is everywhere in Canada at the moment.

And as it should be, our voting turnouts are abysmal. We haven’t had a turnout as low as the November 2000 election since 1898.

Can an advertising campaign actually make us care who leads the country? Of course it can, but how?

The job of advertising, and mass communications, is to catch the attention of the mob (that would be most folks like yourself), hold their attention, and inject a message along one of several communications models.

When the message can do only good and no harm, such as, “Go Vote!” it is hard to condemn the mechanics.

Just don’t believe that you can deny the existence of the mechanics.

Here is a great spot from the states that seems quite relevant here.Boom Chicago Amsterdam

By the way, my birthday IS on January 23, also determined to be the most depressing day of the year. Yay! So go on, go vote, do it for me, I’m repetitive.